How do you like the built-in speaker on your PDA? Even if you're not concerned about the quality of the sound, you may be disappointed with the volume. All that may end relatively soon with a new technology that makes tiny speakers work much better. With current speaker designs, the bigger the diaphragm, the louder–and better–the sound generated. Obviously, handhelds and mobile phones haven't the luxury of a large diaphragm. Matsushita Electric (did you know that it's Panasonic's parent company? I thought it was the other way around!) has eliminated the conventional diaphragm, and replaced it with a transparent panel and a 100 micron gap. The air in the gap is vibrated by the speaker's driver, and therefore works like a diaphragm. Originally, the transparent panel in use was the touch-screen, but that didn't work out. Using your touch-screen as your speaker interfered with the touch-screen technology, not to mention that vibrating the whole screen required a lot of power, and the placement of the driver right behind the screen got in the way of other handheld parts. The ingenious new design involves placing the driver out of the way, and sending the sound down an “acoustic port” (basically a sound tube) to the panel. The resulting sound is much louder, and much clearer. Hopefully we'll see these in PDAs and mobile phones pretty soon! Silicon Valley reports: “Audio tech for handhelds gets an upgrade.” Thanks to PocketNow for the link.Joel's Note: I'm surprised that Bose hasn't started investigating this. After all, the latest Bose speakers are pretty small, and I'm sure it wouldn't take that much to make them small enough for the PDA while sacrificing only a little sound quality.